


Nightmare

by athena_crikey



Series: Sleeper, Slayer, Scholar [2]
Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Attraction, Drama, Multi, Night Mare, Team-fic, Trevor can't make up his mind, Vignette, slight gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 01:45:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13136547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athena_crikey/pseuds/athena_crikey
Summary: Night brings with it all sorts of terrors.





	Nightmare

It’s pissing rain, the kind of unforgiving cords of water that have sleet in their future. It will be cold enough to freeze by midnight, Trevor predicts, blowing on his hands. It does little to warm his chilled, soaked skin. His new cloak is waterlogged, the dark wool heavy and sodden, and when he tucks his arms under it it’s like being wrapped in a soaked shroud. 

As they travel south of Gresit, they find the land has been laid waste by the night hordes, barns burnt and animals slaughtered. The people are either gone or lie beside their livestock, nothing more than carrion-fodder now. The puddles are red with blood. 

By now the three of them have become coldly accustomed to the death and gore left in the demons’ wake. Adrian no longer turns up his nose; Sypha no longer searches for survivors. Trevor has no such habits to break; he was raised to this life. He just never imagined returning to it from the bottom of the tankard he has been inhabiting for the past five years. 

“There is a dwelling ahead,” announces Adrian; his night vision is easily the keenest. “It’s empty.” As are his ears – when listening for the beat of a human heart, at least. 

“Then we stop there tonight. No point catching our deaths out here.” Trevor doesn’t know if Adrian has a death to catch – the lore is shaky when it comes to half-breeds. Although Adrian seems to have inherited most if not all a vampire’s traits, he is out here in the middle of a godless night with them, trekking overground in a bitter spring to find and kill his father. That, at least, counts in his favour.

  
***

“There were children here,” says Sypha in a hushed voice as they light a candle once in out of the ugly night. The air at least has only a slight smell of must from the thatched roof – no reek of blood or the other indignities that come with death. But there’s an empty child’s bed and a wickerwork bassinette lying empty that speak of the lives torn asunder by Dracula’s monsters – if not dead, then banished from their homelands with what little they could carry on their backs.

They have met very few survivors. 

Adrian is poking around the tiny cottage with what looks like curiosity – compared to the grandness of Dracula’s castle, it must seem another world. At Sypha’s prompt he looks at the empty beds with a blank expression, eyes impassive. Not once since they met has Trevor seen anything that looks like regret pass his face. But then the destruction of Wallachia isn’t his doing, and he has a bloody great scar across his chest from his first attempt to put a stop to it. 

There is only one adult-sized bed in the room, and it’s scarcely large enough for two people – just a plain straw mat with rough wool blankets. He looks at Sypha, already drooping even as she shrugs out of her heavy cloak and hangs it up on a chair-back to dry; they’ve had scarcely half a night’s rest in the past three days. “You take the bed,” he tells her. 

“I could sleep in the child’s bed,” she offers, tentatively. He knows if she does, she’ll get no sleep. Not with the soft smell of the likely dead child in her head. 

“No – you take the bed. I’ll sit up a while.”

Adrian says nothing as Sypha lies down in the bed and Trevor takes a seat at the table, only to transition onto the floor when he’s sure she’s no longer watching. He wants nothing more than to get his head down for a few hours of decent, uninterrupted sleep…

  
***

“Recite our adversaries and their banes.”

The library smells, as always, of ancient paper and bookbinders’ glue. His father stands in front of the tall bay windows casting a long shadow onto the wooden floor, a shadow that falls over Trevor’s desk and the tomes piled on it. 

Trevor kicks his short legs – too short even to reach the floor – and makes a face. But he begins reciting dutifully: “Salt slays demons; holy for undead. Iron purges spirits; it’s fire that ice dreads.”

As he drones on the room begins to darken, a cloud passing over the sun turning it into a red orb. The room begins to smell metallic, a thick unnerving scent. The walls begin to run with red paint – no, not paint. Blood.

Trevor tries to stand but is unable to move, frozen in his high seat. His father is still watching him, his high cheeks beginning to sink, his clear eyes to cloud over. 

“Water quenches fire; wind rules the skies…” he can’t stop, his high voice carrying on and on along the tedious rhyme as before him his father’s heavy form begins to waste away, back bending and skin becoming thin and spotted. 

As Trevor watches from his desk, his father tries to take a step forward and falls to his knees. The skin is melting from his hands and face now, revealing the bone beneath. He collapses into a heap, empty eye sockets staring up at Trevor, jaw gaping open –

“ _Trevor._ ”

Trevor snaps awake with a cry, sitting up so sharply he barks his shin on something. 

“Light a goddamn candle,” he says, even as his hand reaches reflexively to his hip and the whip curled there. There’s a clicking of flint against steel, and a single candle sputters to life. Revealing Adrian standing over him, sword in hand. The long, thin blade is dripping an oily black. 

“There was a night mare on the roof,” the vampire says dispassionately, staring down at Trevor. From the bed Sypha takes in a sharp breath, then cries out, “Mother!”

Adrian steps over to wake her as Trevor rubs a hand across his face, and then his aching shin. Sypha bolts up out of the straw bed at Adrian’s touch, hands raised defensively. She, too, looks at Adrian’s stained sword.

“Night mare,” explains Adrian. “They take our darkest memories and distort them, make them something worse.” He tears off a strip of blanket, and wipes the ichor from his sword. 

Trevor thinks of his father, who died not fighting monsters as he had been raised to, but a dejected and broken old man crushed by the Church’s excommunication – by their rejection of the family, of everything he and the Belmonts of generations past had done for Wallachia. Grand house long since seized by the Church, he had died friendless and alone in a hovel on the outskirts of Giurgiu, where Trevor had found him – eventually. There had been little left of him by that point. 

At his death, Trevor took on the title of the last living Belmont.

They gather round the candlelight, the three of them the best equipped in the country to end Dracula’s scourge, and still drawn to the reassurance of fire in the darkness. 

Sypha is shaking; she chaffs her hands as she sits at the table, nibbling at her lip. Adrian, ever courtly, drapes the blanket from the bed over her thin shoulders. She smiles up at him. Trevor, never courtly, swings his chair around backwards and straddles it, thumping his hands down on the table. A little stream of wax dribbles down the side of the candle, flame flickering momentarily. 

“You going to sit?” Trevor asks him, gesturing at the third chair, sure the vampire will decline, that he will loom over them as always, cool and aloof.

Adrian rounds the table, pulls out the chair, and gracefully takes a seat, legs crossed. 

“Will wonders never cease.” Trevor’s tone is soft and sarcastic. Adrian gives him a dry look, golden eyes slanted. He has long eyelashes for a man, Trevor can’t help noticing – nearly as long as Sypha’s, and naturally dark against his pale skin. 

Adrian crosses his arms, leaning back in his chair and looking from Sypha to Trevor. “You should get more rest – we will reach the castle soon and there will be nowhere to sleep safely within its walls.” 

“We’ll sleep when the candle burns down,” replies Trevor – for once, Sypha sides with him, rather than Adrian, if only by her silence. 

Seated at the table in the candle’s buttery glow, the two of them look delicate and fragile – Sypha with her huge blue eyes and narrow face, Adrian with his high cheekbones and sharp chin. With their thin frames and elegant demeanours, they look as though they would be easily crushed. And yet Sypha would effortlessly burn the heart out of any creature who dared, while Adrian would simply eviscerate an enemy in the blink of the eye. 

Not since his childhood has he been surrounded by others as capable – and whose hands are as bloodied – as himself. It gives him a sense of home he never imagined he would feel again. 

“Tell us more of this castle,” he says. Together, the three of them will spin out the minutes until the candle runs out – and after that, sleep through the darkness until dawn.


End file.
